


Tír na nÓg

by MarkoftheAsphodel



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu | Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War
Genre: Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Post-Canon, Shapeshifting, Slow Burn, Species Dysphoria, Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-31
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-09-21 05:55:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9534710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarkoftheAsphodel/pseuds/MarkoftheAsphodel
Summary: In which the bard who's really a prince who's really not technically himself and the token human of the Last Crusade settle accounts with one another at the far end of the world, in flashes of myth, history, science, the divine, reincarnation, and the endless loop of time. Inspired by this random tumblr anon who keeps dropping Lewyn/Finn asks into the inboxes of various fen. Implied background of Lewyn/Erinys and Finn/Lachesis.





	1. Arrested Decay

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for references to an offscreen suicide attempt, wartime atrocities including rape and for some dysphoria issues due to one of the characters not being entirely human.
> 
> Author’s warning that characters portrayed as thinking, speaking, and acting in certain ways regarding sensitive issues does not constitute endorsement by the author, no way no how. Author's warning that the names from the Fire Emblem Heroes website are used regardless of my preference on said names.
> 
> Also, massive Jugdral spoilers for one character's true identity but if you read this far you probably already know that.

The winds of Tirnanog immerse Lewyn in streaming fragments of song, echoes of past deeds great and terrible and the premonitions of things to come. Long, long ago and far, far away, Tír na nÓg was an earthly paradise, known to mortal men as mere legend until one day a divine maiden carried one young human hero there on her magical horse…

_Lies._

There are no winged horses here. Pegasi live across the water in Silesse, a place Lewyn never expects to see again. And this Tirnanog appears to the eye no paradise, but a ghost town, another place gutted by war and left to decay in the newborn peace. The people who huddled in Tirnanog in times of darkness have followed King Shannan into the light; the great cities of Sophara and Rivough and Isaach’s own namesake thrive while Tirnanog yields to the elements. Moss creeps up the the burnt shells of peasant hovels; the fortress walls now sprout saplings. Only the shuttered convent is stable enough for shelter.

Finn is where Lewyn left him, nestled in a pile of blankets in one of the rooms where Emperor Seliph played as a child. He is not quite conscious, eyes open to the bland white-washed ceiling but seeing nothing. It will be days before he comes to his senses— not on account of the massive self-inflicted wound, as Lewyn’s healed that completely, but from the sheer magnitude of magic involved both in healing that wound and in getting him here to Tirnanog.

Lewyn has all the time in the world. He takes out his pipes, sits upon a portion of the crumbling wall, and plays a tune to the hares and the blackbirds. The winds in his ears want to give him lyrics, a litany of names and heroics spanning the full breadth of human existence, but Lewyn doesn’t sing. He plays, and the notes are carried off by the wind to some place beyond the stars.

-x-

This should be a sacred place, Lewyn thinks as he waits to not be alone. The four walls that sheltered Emperor Seliph through his childhood, the sanctuary that so many of the New Crusaders called home during the time of Emperor Arvis, ought to be teeming with pilgrims. The people of Tirnanog could've gotten rich selling trinkets as counterfeit relics, charging fees to see the bed, the toys, the first wooden practice sword of Jugdral's hero.

_Come, sit on this tree that Lord Seliph would climb, stand on the rock where he'd ponder his destiny at sundown._

They could've made a carnival of Tirnanog but after so many years penned up in the most remote corner of Isaach they couldn't wait to get out. Lewyn can't blame them, given the steppes to the south and east of Tirnanog are a killing field. Just outside the convent there's a cross scratched into the paving stones, and Lewyn knows it marks the place where a local girl flung herself off the belltower after one of King Danan's soldiers assaulted her. Inside the fortress walls the spirits are too benign for the place to truly be haunted, but outside on the steppes, it's hard to tell the howling of the wolves from the keening of the dead who never got a proper burial. So, Tirnanog has been abandoned the way Bragi's spire out in lonely Orgahill was abandoned, and the convent is showing the strain of a few northern winters. It doesn't take long, up here, for even a palace to become a ruin.

Lewyn doesn't need a palace, though a part of him enjoys the aesthetics of a good stylish ruin. This convent never was the former and hasn't yet become the latter. Lewyn can wait.

He folds up his outer garment in place of a pillow and sleeps on the floor alongside Finn. A noise in the night sounds like one of the village girls being murdered a second time, but it's just the scream of an abandoned goat wandering the hills.

-x-

After three days Finn awakens, sits up, has harsh words for Lewyn for interrupting his carefully planned suicide in the desert. This delights Lewyn; he’d been ready for more of the usual, for shamefaced stammering and the use of his hated title.

“That’s the spirit,” he says, brushing the long fringe of hair out of Finn’s eyes, and he has to jerk his hand away quickly lest Finn bite him. He has damned sharp teeth, for a human anyway, and Lewyn’s been on the receiving end before. “All right, if you’re feeling like that, go play outside.”

He doesn’t get far; Finn’s as wobbly a newborn foal and Lewyn has to haul him out to the unkempt garden where the last of the season’s bees are looking unsuccessfully for nectar among the hopsage and balsamroot. Satisfied that Finn won’t be getting himself into any more trouble, Lewyn strolls through the empty rooms of the convent with his lute, playing an old liturgical song that in another time, on another continent, will have a very amusing and very vulgar set of lyrics. When this diversion palls, he walks outside into the weak afternoon sunlight and finds Finn resting against the same hollow in the garden wall where Lewyn likes to sit and enjoy a song or three. Finn doesn’t turn to face Lewyn, but he eventually speaks with the slurred diction of someone tired unto intoxication.

“Ethnia takes back everything under this sun.”

Lewyn shakes his head— not to disagree about the state of Tirnanog, but because he knows more of Finn’s beloved Earth Mother than Finn ever will.

-x-

Tirnanog is a twilight realm. Here in the farthest reaches of Isaach, more northerly than most of the snowy hills of blessed Silesse, there are but two states of being— long blue nights of summer, only briefly interrupted by true star-speckled darkness, and equally long black nights of winter punctuated by feeble daylight. Lewyn finds a haunting beauty in both phases of twilight, ethereal blue and sepulchral gray. 

The sky is neither blue or gray, at once both flat and infinitely deep, as Lewyn carries Finn back indoors.

“Why of all places did you take me here?” the bone-tired voice mumbles into his shoulder.

“It’s the one place on Jugdral you’ve never seen, right?” Lewyn says as he shifts the weight on his back. “You got the Grand Tour twice but no trip to Isaach. I was just filling in the gaps for you.”

The sky’s afterglow filters dimly through the stained glass of the western windows as Lewyn helps Finn to settle back into his nest of blankets on the cold expanse of the mosaic floor.  
    
"I know you're not actually Lewyn."

"You wound me," he says, deliberately tactless in his choice of words. "I am everything that Lewyn was-- less a few scattershot memories, perhaps-- and more besides."

"What did you say the first time we met?”

It takes a moment for that memory to coalesce the way a mirage appears on the frozen sea.

"I looked you over from head to toe, admired your pretty tunic and your cute little boots, and said 'I didn't know they let boys ride pegasi down here.' You turned bright pink and stamped off. In your cute little boots."

Finn doesn’t call him a liar. He breathes deeply a few times, then closes his eyes, and Lewyn takes that as an affirmation.

"Ethlyn dressed you up like a doll,” he says, running a finger along Finn’s cheek. “I was surprised they let you do any actual work in those clothes. Then again, letting you work in those clothes told the rest of us just how much gold Quan had to spend on the things he liked.”

The jab is wasted, as Finn’s lost consciousness again. Lewyn doesn’t plan to sleep here in the convent; he can sleep out on the wall beneath the stars, or in one of the few large trees. But Finn is restless this evening, turning over in the blankets and mouthing nonsensical fragments of conversation, and so Lewyn sits beside him, playing as softly as human fingers can manage on the lute. Any positive effect is undone when one of Isaach’s famous black eagles lets loose a shriek.

“Relax." Lewyn grips Finn by the shoulders until the alarm in Finn’s blue eyes subsides. “The war’s over, soldier. Even a wandering goatherd isn't going to find us here. You think it was happenstance that this place could shelter Seliph and the others for so long?"

It was a little garden of children then, carefully tended both inside and out.

"Its purpose may be fulfilled, but something lingers yet,” Lewyn says in the voice he would use on Julia when she woke up screaming.

-x-

The Tír na nÓg of myth exists in the most perfect moments of spring, summer, autumn, and winter at once-- a land of unfurled flowers that never wither, succulent fruit that never bruises, ripened grain that never rots, sparkling waters that neither muddy nor freeze, snowflakes that never degrade to shapeless mounds of slush. Or maybe Lewyn's making the last one up as he goes along, because his perfect world must have snow even if no one else cares for it. But this Tirnanog is of autumn declining to winter-- muted shades and the smells of cold clay and old wood crumbling beneath a shell of lichen.

There’s a comfort in that, maybe.

-x-

The first thing Finn does in the morning is to ask where his lance might be.

"I took the liberty of cleaning it up when you were sleeping and you can have it back when I know you won't use it to gut yourself or me.” Lewyn isn’t making that one up; he’d taken his time getting every last fleck of filth off the polished blue gems in the head of the lance. "Speaking of that... Quan gave you quite the pretty piece of jewelry in that lance, but I can't imagine something worse if you want to run yourself through. Just use a sword next time. It might not carry the symbolism you want but it's a hell of a lot more efficient."

"Why do you imagine efficiency would factor into my plans?" 

Finn sounds so disgusted-- at himself, at Lewyn, at his favored weapon— that Lewyn’s lips twitch in an involuntary smile. 

"And why do you imagine I would put myself through that again?” Finn asks.

"Dying hurts, doesn't it?” This time Lewyn lets the smile linger in a moment of shared self-disgust. "I remember being on my back, gasping like a fish while Manfroy had a good long laugh, and I wasn't thinking of Mother or Erinys or my son or my glorious ancestors. All I could hold in my head for those final moments of light was _Shit, this hurts_.”

“Do you know what else hurts?” says Finn after a moment of quiet, and Lewyn remembers then something he’s never completely forgotten, that this well-mannered example of Jugdrali chivalry can be a cocky little shit when nobody’s there to judge him for it. “Being this hungry.”

“Sorry, there’s no food here. I heard the kids telling tales of how long you could get by without it and figured it wasn’t necessary.”

There’s something rewarding in the look of undiluted hatred he gets in return. Lewyn whistles to himself as he goes to fetch what serves as breakfast in what’s left of this town.

“This tastes exactly like what we have at home,” Finn says of the jug of dark ale that Lewyn brings in lieu of bread. “Where did you get this?”

“I made it.”

It’s not exactly a lie. He hasn’t been brewing up ale, of course. He’s just managed to “freshen up” the dregs of what remained in the convent’s cellar.

“It’s good. I hope there’s enough of it to drown in,” says Finn, and Lewyn appreciates the double meaning enough to be glad there isn’t. 

He’s not particularly worried that Finn will try to recreate the dramatic little tableau that Lewyn interrupted in the desert, but there remains the slight possibility that once Finn is at full strength again, he’ll attempt to either shank Lewyn or strangle him. Even so, Lewyn sits down beside him as Finn drinks his breakfast. 

"You asked me what I actually was,” Lewyn says, his voice as purged of levity or irony or anything else that might give the impression he’s less than sincere in this moment.

"I did no such thing. I stated that you were not Lewyn,” Finn replies, already collected enough to fall back into his public voice, neutral and precise, with no allowance for either feeling or error. He’s keeping himself an equally precise physical distance from Lewyn, using the blankets as a shield.

"I am Lewyn. I am Forseti. I am a human prince with the blood of a god in his veins and I am that god. This body was dead and it's alive.”

Lewyn stretches one hand toward the low-burning fire he’s been tending the last four days. He can see human bones under a red outline of flesh illuminated by the flames. 

"What, then, is the line that divides you from the Deadlords?"

"I should've known you'd be the one to ask that question.” He hadn’t anticipated it, though, and he doesn’t begin to have anything resembling an answer. "I wish I knew."

Lewyn hears the click of the empty jug on the mosaic floor, and it occurs to him now that Finn could be a great deal more trouble than he’d anticipated when he’d whisked the only human survivor of the Last Crusade out of the bloodstained sands of the Yied. He’s getting the same unsettled feeling as he did when he realized the truth about Julia, and so Lewyn tries to be sincere again.

"Look. There are a million things I don't know. I'm as much of an actual god as the real Lewyn was an actual bard."

"I'm tired,” Finn says in response, for all that he’s slept the better part of a week. It’s both a summary of being and an unequivocal message for Lewyn to shut the hell up.

"Yeah, I know. That didn't make sense to me either,” says Lewyn. He drags Finn out to the garden again, leaves him there in the soft light of the northern autumn, and proceeds to wander the ruins of the fortress with his pipes. The winds have nothing but gibberish for him that day.

-x-

There’s no simple or singular explanation for why Lewyn does what he does.

He doesn’t know precisely what triggered him to leave Erinys and the kids the times that he left, or what summoned him home for a few days at a time until the one year he left for good. He doesn’t know exactly how he came to be outside the walls of Belhalla at the exact time to find a gravely wounded little girl who turned out to be the key to ending the Crusade. And up until a few days ago he hasn’t even been sure why he hasn’t left this place entirely, why he hasn’t gone back to report to Naga and the elders that the sordid little business in Jugdral is finally mopped up and the humans there need no more intervention. 

Obviously, he’s had to pull off one more intervention.

_Well, what now? Should we while away the hours talking of the women we failed to protect, of the sons who somehow have made their peace with our shortcomings and the daughters who still carry a seed of anger in their hearts?_

Lewyn looks out over the western hills and wonders how Ced is making out across the sea in Silesse, how Fee is enjoying her new life as a duchess of Grannvale. He wonders how many years it’ll take before Ced’s descendants meet Fee’s on the battlefield, the way multiple generations of Forseti’s bloodline annihilated each other in his own time. There is no lasting peace under the sun and no lasting peace in the embrace of the earth.

The universe offers him a lot of “no” answers, a lot of silent denials.

His new companion is a master of silence and denial. As the days pass in a series of bluish twilights growing ever more gray, they begin to exchange the sort of comments an onlooker might take as evidence of camaraderie, the dialogue that assumes some long-ago shared foundation. Nothing of any real significance is said, but it’s… something.

Lewyn knows that Finn is a performer in his own right, able to drop the mask of perfect courtesy when it’s time to order soldiers around, able to soil his white gloves when it’s time to get down to the brutal business of killing. The artifice of being the perfect Lance Knight of Leonster must be nearly as arduous as the artifice of being Lewyn in his various guises, and in the emptiness of Tirnanog there’s little reason to keep up appearances.

And so, they reach the day where they don’t bother to.

“Did you bring an entire orchestra along with you?”

They’re having a modest supper on the convent floor; Finn’s used his increasing strength to dig two handfuls of tiny potatoes and a head of garlic out of the garden that afternoon, so tonight’s repast is a feast compared to the beer and balls of fried dough that Lewyn’s been making out of the old barrels of flour and jars of oil left in the cellar. Lewyn’s folded up the blankets to the proximate size of the cushions that nobles of Isaach recline on to dine and he’s playing his lyre. It’s a weird imitation of court life and only one of them is finding it amusing. 

“Of course not.”

Lewyn’s in the mood to push some boundaries. He stands for effect, holds the lyre out with one hand and makes a stage flourish at it with the other. The lyre becomes a set of pipes. He repeats the gesture, and the pipes in turn become a lute, which then transforms to a beaded maraca and thence to a tambourine.

Finn, after drinking the semi-miraculous beer— and, oh yes, essentially waking from death— is not impressed by these carnival stunts.

“Do you expect applause?” 

“I have better tricks up my sleeve.” Lewyn laces his fingers and flexes his arms outward. “I can be everything you want me to be…”

He’s done this in the past for the sake of a disguise, and on one occasion for gold, but never before on a petty whim. It feels almost like a botched warp spell cast by a trainee who can’t quite pull it off; Lewyn feels his form dissolve partway and almost immediately return. This time, though, there’s the sensation of everything not quite going back the way it ought to. His limbs become rounded, his body rearranges itself into the pleasing shape of a lady’s _chitarra_ , his hair flows down to his waist and beyond in green ripples.

“Would you rather enjoy my company in this fashion?” His voice, though, hasn’t much changed. He does a pirouette, an imitation of one of Silvia’s dances, to Finn’s utter disinterest.

“No? Not to your liking? Is this, then, what you were searching for out in the sands?” 

Lewyn’s form dissolves again, this time only enough to let the feminine form become compact, with dainty limbs. His long hair now takes the shade of pure Agustrian gold, and the voice he uses to taunt Finn is close enough to that of the long-gone Lachesis that Finn visibly recoils, his defenses vulnerable to this particular attack.

Lewyn has one more trick, though. He performs the spell a third time, and his limbs lengthen again as the contours of his body shift back to a male form, one sporting more taut muscle than Lewyn’s ever carried on his natural frame. His scalp itches as all the lush golden hair retracts.

“Or was it this?”

He speaks in the tones of the long-dead Quan. Finn responds to this with stony silence, a locked jaw and no other motion, but his eyes tell Lewyn everything. There’s a seething hatred in them that Lewyn thinks has _probably_ only before been directed at Travant of Thracia, but before the hatred rises there’s a flash of something else, something that tells Lewyn this time he’s gone exactly as far as he wanted to.

A flash of light, bright as an indoor sun, paints Finn and everything else in the room as Lewyn snaps back to his usual form.

“Oh, and this body regenerates, which means you can’t kill me. So don’t try,” says Lewyn. 

He’s not even sure if it’s true. As it is, he feels weak in a way he never has before after shape-shifting, almost like he’s reeling from blood loss. He settles back into the makeshift cushion as gracefully as he can manage and reaches for the tambourine. There’s not enough magical reserve in him right now to transform it back into a lyre, and in any event Finn’s already stalked out of the room.

_More for me._

Lewyn digs into the abandoned plate of potatoes and garlic. For once, he feels like he actually needs them.


	2. Orbital Mechanics

_Thwack._

Lewyn is dreaming with his eyes open, immersed in a reverie of the first summer Fee was old enough to go picking berries in the hallowed tradition of Silesse. It’s just the four of them on the mountainside, the pegasus guard flying at a respectful distance as the beleaguered royal family has an outing like an ordinary family would've had in some ordinary time. The winds whisper in the voices of Erinys and the children, and when Fee holds up her first cloudberry, golden and bursting with juice, Lewyn catches a taste of it—

_Thwack._

There’s no berry in his hands, no Erinys, no kids. There’s the blue-gray sky above Tirnanog and a cold stone wall and the sound of Finn chopping wood.

Finn’s refused any more assistance from Lewyn since the night Lewyn showed off his shape-shifting skills. They pass like ghosts in the deepening twilight, not saying a word. Lewyn plays his orchestra’s worth of instruments and Finn goes off to do random things of little value. He’s stolen back his lance and tests his strength by hefting it against imaginary enemies or he does what he’s doing right now, using an old hatchet to chop up wood that’s too rotten to be of any use in a fire.

_Thwack._

It’s an irritating sound. Lewyn sits up on his wall, planning to drown it out with a tune, and he sees that Finn’s taken his shirt off to work despite the crisp air. Instead of playing, Lewyn watches with the flute dangling loosely between his fingers as Finn grapples with a sad little dead tree. No one is here to mentor or corrupt, to judge or give any fraction of a damn. Besides, he can make the argument that Finn’s body is Lewyn’s own handiwork to admire. And really it’s not a bad sight at all; wherever his head was at by the time he reached the Yied, Finn was in better condition than he’d been for most of Seliph’s war, which he spent either half-starved or exhausted. He’s never achieved the godlike splendor of the the Quans or Sigurds of the world— and Lewyn’s skin remembers what it’d been like to so briefly have Quan’s figure— but Finn’s come a long way from the reedy youth in girlish boots who trailed Quan like a shadow. 

And Lewyn’s done quite a fine job of repairing the catastrophic mess Finn made when he fell on his lance, not that he’s ever been properly thanked for it. He’s earned the right to enjoy this— to enjoy the contrast of Finn’s sunburnt neck and pale shoulders, the way his bright blue hair stands out even in the muted light that can barely cast shadows, and how Finn’s lithe shape measures up against classic statues of the original Crusaders that were really excuses to sculpt half-naked men. After all, he hasn’t let himself enjoy anything of the sort since that last night he parted from Erinys.

For a dead man, his cock functions quite well. Otherwise Fee wouldn’t exist.

Lewyn has his trousers done up again when Finn passes by, his shirt back on but a trail of perspiration coursing down his cheek along the same path that Lewyn’s traced with his finger while Finn was sleeping. Their eyes meet for the first time in days, and though there’s a challenge in the glance that passes from Finn to Lewyn, Finn’s no longer projecting a tightly-coiled anger in every direction. Lewyn quirks the corners of his mouth upward in a half-smile, and Finn shakes it off and returns to the convent without a sound.

Lewyn has no doubt at all that Finn knows. He’s banking on it.

-x-

The basic rules of civilized life, the etiquette that binds kings and knights alike, has no place in Tirnanog. Lewyn knows he’s a shiftless vagrant who sleeps on a wall and who can never go home again and he’s not entirely sure what Finn is now that he’s given up being a knight of House Nova after being nothing but that for two decades and more. Their wives are dead. Their children don’t need them, or maybe don’t want them, or maybe a little of both. Everyone is presumably getting by just fine without them.

They begin to talk again of trivial things, digressing now and then with a “remember when?” without ever offering one another apologies or explanations or anything that their previous lives demanded of them. As the long autumn passes into winter, Lewyn notices that Finn's begun doing slightly more useful things to keep himself busy, like pulling out weeds from the untended garden bed or placing paving stones back in a tidy path instead of a frost-heaved jumble. Every few days Lewyn comes across a window that's been polished, a corner that's been swept, some article of everyday life that's been rescued from the collapsing village and put to use. He supposes that he might have done these things, or at least that he might lend a hand to Finn's small improvements, but the mechanism within Lewyn that propels him to action simply doesn't care if the dirt ever gets scrubbed from the windows. He'd rather sit on his garden wall, or in the branches of a tree, playing a tune while the wind fills his ears and pulls at his hair.

That's not to say he doesn't take pleasure in whatever small comforts Finn adds to their life. There's a satisfaction in coming back from a sojourn of piping in the hills to find a hot meal of foraged mushrooms and the usual fried dough waiting for him on a clean china plate. Next to his plate is the latest salvaged treasure that Lewyn doesn't recognize. Lewyn runs a finger along the rim of the ornate glass the locals of Tirnanog would've used for a sweetened tisane and draws an eerie musical tone out of it.

"Nice," he says, for the glass must be genuine crystal. "I wonder if this belonged to Shannan?"

"Had you gone with me instead of off on your own, you'd know the answer to that."

"How can I maintain my self-image as the worthless bard if I did anything so productive?"

Lewyn hopes to elict an eye-roll out of Finn, as he’d gotten damn close with his previous act of intentional bad behavior, but this time Finn covers his mouth with one hand and produces an unmistakable stifled sound he can’t fully pass off as a coughing fit. 

"Got you to laugh," Lewyn says, and something inside of him is delighted with the simple, even stupid joy found in popping a soap bubble or blowing the fluff off a dandelion.

"You did." Finn is still smiling behind his hand. "The worthless bard wins this round."

-x-

Winter tightens its grip on Tirnanog and the cold breath of the wind sends Lewyn’s blood coursing. They make an excursion beyond the hills to the ocean, to a rugged but beautiful shoreline marked by the picturesque wreck of a skiff, and Lewyn stares out across the green waves dotted with whitecaps knowing Silesse, beautiful and forbidden to him now, is on the other side of this particular sea. The very wind that caresses his face came down from the mountains of Silesse, now blanketed in pristine new snow, the same snow that covers both Erinys and his mother. In order to not think about any of this, Lewyn sits cross-legged on the sand and watches as Finn runs down the length of the beach. It’s almost touching, Finn’s pointless dedication to maintaining a body that no one has a real use for any longer, that’s destined to be taken apart one molecule at a time by Mother Ethnia no matter what he does. It’s such a human thing to do, Lewyn thinks, human in its very futility.

It’s snowed a little, and new flakes cling to the reeds that fringe the beach, turning their faded and tattered panicles back into feathery white plumes. Lewyn cannot resist touching his tongue to one glittering plume; the snow evaporates instantly upon his tongue and he tastes the salt spray coating the reeds. Lewyn wants to teach Finn the word they used in Silesse for snow like this, the snow that gleams like silver spangles in the moonlight and can be blown away with the puff of one breath, but it isn't inside his head anymore. Lewyn knows that he knew it and feels the absence but cannot summon that single word back into his consciousness.

It bothers him as they trudge back toward Tirnanog through the flurry, bothers him like the intermittent pain of a cracked tooth. 

_I am everything that Lewyn was-- less a few scattershot memories, perhaps._

That missing word never comes back to him.

-x-

"Storms are coming."

So says Lewyn on the afternoon following their seaside excursion. Finn scans from horizon to horizon at the deep blue dome of the sky, freshly scoured by a rain squall that passed by in the early hours before dawn.

“If you say so,” he replies, for it doesn’t matter whether Lewyn is right or wrong or simply making things up. Lewyn smiles at Finn’s growing acceptance of the liberating absurdities of life in Tirnanog.

"Let's go out into the hills tonight,” he says then.

“Out in the hills to enjoy a storm. Why not?”

And so Finn puts on his old military coat (which Lewyn also did a fine job cleaning up, not that received any thanks for that, either), and Lewyn bundles up in a tattered striped scarf knitted for him by loving hands in another life, and they go up into the hills looking like the ghosts of the squire and the errant prince. The night is velvet-black and strewn with stars— red and yellow, pure white and faintly blue— and one meteor falls in an elegant stream, as though some unseen calligrapher had dipped a pen in light itself and written on the sky.

“Where is your storm?” asks Finn, for the air remains still and crystalline, so still that the voice of the winds is just at the threshold of even Lewyn’s senses.

“It’s a star-storm,” Lewyn replies, and he hopes Finn can see his grin in the starlight as they settle into the dying grass. Another meteor falls, this time in a quick little flash of white, followed by a third.

“There was one of those when I was a child, the year my parents died,” says Finn. “Nobody knew whether it meant something miraculous or if the end of the world were at hand.”

“Whoever thought what, they weren’t entirely wrong. But, see, this is the same storm.”

Lewyn begins to tell Finn of one of the many things he knows that the natives of Jugdral have never yet learned, that once every thirty-three years the orb of the world turns its face into a stream of celestial debris, the dustings of a comet’s tail. 

“They’re not just harbingers of fate, you know, placed like road-signs in the sky by some helpful deity. They’re actual little bodies of stone and ice out there beyond the planets, leftovers from the birth of the sun and its worlds,” Lewyn says, and he tries to explain comets to a man who’s been taught the universe via neat little diagrams of nested spheres. “The idea of crystal spheres turning to heavenly music is one of the most beautifully daft ideas you people have ever come up with. I’m almost sorry I can’t hear that music. I bet it would be something.”

The star-storm is picking up, as these bits of primordial dust strike the very air they breathe and so die in splendor, and just in case science isn’t doing the job Lewyn turns toward poetry.

"Haven't you ever wondered what and where you were a thousand years ago, or what and where you might be a thousand years hence? This song and dance never fully stops, you know. Every sun and every earth, every human and every false god, fixed in these interlocking rhythms of destruction and creation from before the dawn of time until after the twilight of the real gods.”

“I don’t want to be anything in a thousand years,” says Finn. “I don’t particularly want to be anything tomorrow.”

And yet, he leans against Lewyn in the dark, and not as two soldiers might huddle for warmth. Lewyn’s been in this moment before beneath the stars, with someone else on some other hill, in that moment when hands start brushing against thighs and feet start exploring boundaries one nudge at a time. The storm strikes, and the skies blaze with long ribbons of scarlet and gold, quick flashes of ice-white and emerald, and Lewyn drops his voice to a whisper, almost as soft as the breath of the wind itself. 

“We’re all falling endlessly through space and time, condensing and evaporating as a drop of water in an infinite stream…”

His lips close on Finn’s earlobe. Finn bends to Lewyn the way a reed yields to the wind… the reed that survives while the sturdy trees splinter and break. One meteor, blue as the heart of the flame and brighter than any star, splits the skies above them. It sings to itself as it dies.

-x-

_How do you like reaching the point where absolutely nothing matters, having spent all your life treading the line between resistance and surrender?_

Lewyn flicks his tongue across the hollow of Finn’s throat and is relieved he doesn’t taste a damn thing like Erinys.

That’s always been part of the problem. Lewyn hadn’t just been poking fun at Finn’s outfit when he compared Finn to a boy pegasus knight all those years ago. That essential earnestness, manifesting in everything from his eternal sense of duty to the way jokes sailed past him, it’s reminded Lewyn of Erinys from the first time they met. He was at once too much like Erinys for Lewyn to be comfortable, and just different enough for Lewyn to find it annoying. And then Ced turned out the same way, making Lewyn wonder if it was just his fate to have that sort of person in his orbit.

He’s got Finn beneath him, and Lewyn now knows that the world has pulled and peeled and flayed Finn into something Erinys could never be and taken him to places Erinys, bless her virtuous soul, would never go. When he proposed to her they do the exact thing he’s doing now, she looked at him with shock and said “Lord Lewyn, why would you joke about such things?”

The myth of Tír na nÓg says a beautiful woman, neither fully human nor truly godly, brought a young warrior to her enchanted realm on her magical flying horse. Lewyn can’t escape Erinys as he presses his body into Finn’s because the wind won’t let him forget, but he wonders how badly the winds have bungled the story as it’s told and retold over thousands of years.

-x-

In the morning Finn always cleans up everything and has breakfast made before Lewyn lifts his head from the pillow. That, too, is a little too close to Erinys, even if Finn does these things out of habit instead of deference. There isn’t any damn deference in the dark, that’s for sure— Lewyn has the bite marks scored into his flesh to prove it— and Lewyn has the suspicion that Jugdral’s knight without peer and beyond reproach is just pleased to be getting some cock after gods-know-how-many years without.

This, in turn, makes Lewyn wonder anew at who and what they are without their set roles in Jugdral’s great drama to ground them. Tirnanog, now in thrall to winter, doesn’t care.

It's Lewyn's kind of winter, with snow drifts taller than any man's head and days where the sun pops up for few hours before giving night free reign over the land. A twilight world. Lewyn would be happy here doing nothing, burrowing into a pile of furs for day-long sleep and then streaking across the snowy plains beneath a black, black sky painted by the northern lights, for the thrill and to get his blood moving again.

And so nothing is what they do. Once the most basic necessities of hauling water and cooking a bit of food and making sure the convent isn’t tumbling around their ears are met, he and Finn take orders from no one, answer to no one, give thought to nothing and no one.

The liberation has been earned, Lewyn thinks as he runs his fingers through Finn’s azure hair as Finn unlaces Lewyn’s trousers. Every bloody moment of it.

-x-

Before Lewyn fully grasps the revelation of this winter, the first flowers of spring are poking through the crust of melting snow. In Tirnanog, the springtide is as fleet as the autumns are lingering, and they try to make the most of it. Finn uses the strengthening daylight to repair the damage that wind and snow and melt have wreaked on the convent, while Lewyn goes out and plays to the birds and the unfurling apple blossom. The morbid pull of decay spurs him to take his lute into the the cemetery, where a handful of clerics sleep alongside a dozen of Tirnanog's slaughtered girls, some with stillborn infants tucked in their arms, some with the delicate bones of the never-born nestled in their bellies.

This is not a good idea in the least. He shouldn't have trespassed among those sad little graves because now he’s remembering Erinys and that third pregnancy, the one that wasn't a child at all but a roiling mass of corruption that was supposed to have killed her. Lewyn had saved her-- or maybe Forseti saved her, if that fine distinction even mattered— by working another miracle he shouldn't have even tried, knowing he would not be able to save her the next time. Knowing there would be a next time, that obliterating every last unseen cell of corruption wasn't within his power.

He never told Erinys the entire truth, because humans don't understand cells or molecules or the physical properties of being. Humans think eating mutton causes an ill temper and that the root cause of melancholy is not shitting often enough. 

Erinys haunts his dreams, and when he’d mentioned this to Finn in passing Finn claimed not to remember his own dreams, which might’ve actually been true. The dreams are bad enough, but Lewyn doesn’t want to deal with her ghost in the daylight, doesn’t want her sad eyes around him or her voice echoing in the wind, and so he goes out to wander the steppes for the first time since the snows retreated.

Another mistake.

Bones poke through the topsoil and as Lewyn walks through them the winds sigh of the departed and their images flicker through his brain. He glimpses an old warrior who made a deliberate last stand against the invader, a young swordfighter who couldn't believe his eyes when the decadent westerners arrived in an onslaught of armored cavalry, a village elder who decided to make herself a model of resistance and paid the price she expected, a girl of fourteen who was dragged by horses after spitting in the face of her captor.

_How does it feel to be the people who were chosen as the flint that made the spark that caused this world to burn?_

There is no escaping the hell that man and dragons made of Jugdral. Ever. Only inside the sanctuary of Tirnanog itself can Lewyn pretend otherwise, and so he runs back, in hopes of escaping everything… including himself.

-x-

The sun climbs as high as it can in this northern sky and the old convent garden almost looks well-loved thanks to Finn’s attention. Lewyn crumbles a cluster of little yellow flowers in his fingers and breathes in the pungent fragrance; he remembers dill flowers sprinkled across tiny golden potatoes, fresh trout and cloudberries folded into thick soured cream. The part of him that really is Lewyn wants follow that memory back over the seas and mountain peaks to Silesse, to take refuge beneath his mother's mantle, but it’s a passing if bittersweet fancy and he lets it dissolve when Finn kisses him with the taste of those yellow flowers passing between them.

Then it’s autumn again, and the trees bear walnuts and small sour apples, and they’re sitting by the fire eating fried dough spread with tangy-sweet compote and laughing like boys over things that happened twenty years ago.

Then freezing rain is falling against the windows and they’re lying in that heap of tangled blankets in the old schoolroom, and Lewyn’s eyelids are heavy and his voice is fuzzy as he tries to communicate some random thing of vast import. 

“Three thousand years from now and another continent from here, a young man in a field will stumble over an old spear half-buried in the earth. He’ll fancy it has some resemblance to a lance from an epic of ancient heroes and he’ll tell his friends he’s found your lance, the fabled lance of the holy wars.”

“How would he even hear of me?” Finn is idly weaving a little plait into Lewyn’s hair. “Does some immortal being in the clothes of bard wander this future continent singing of the last crusades of Jugdral?”

“No,” says Lewyn, and it’s another one of those moments where he doesn’t know why. “That’s not how it happens.”

-x-

Winter. Spring. Summer, again.

Sometimes he and Finn part for days, doing whatever they please in solitude before reuniting. Sometimes they argue.

"Ask Erinys how it feels to have the person you love restored to you through a violation of the basic laws of existence!” Lewyn shouts when Finn asks one barbed question of philosophy too many. “I'm sure you'll encounter her at some point down the line.”

As he says it, there’s a buzzing in his ears and Lewyn has the sobering realization something like that is going to indeed happen, and he spends the rest of the evening in jittery contemplation of what this new version of Erinys might be like, until Finn brings him that glass that might’ve been Shannan’s filled with an herbal tisane and orders him to sleep.

Lewyn can’t sleep; he protests it’s too light, and they go out into their favorite spot in the garden in the summer twilight. The sky is that luminous blue of light refracted through a moonstone, and above them an eagle rides the currents, not seeking prey or companionship but simply soaring, up and then down in a series of grand spirals. Lewyn thinks the eagle must surely be enjoying itself, and he envies this master of the winds and skies.

_You can’t really be Lewyn again. Maybe you don’t have to be Forseti, either, not like you were. Maybe this has opened the path to be something else entirely._

In this moment beneath the moonstone sky, he’s holding Finn as tenderly as Lewyn’s ever held anyone— mother, wife, or child— but in his heart Lewyn is fighting with his other self, wrestling with the urge to throw away his dragonstone, toss it into the well or bury it deep in the earth, and pause that dance of death and rebirth for a while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The meteor shower is real, by the way. It's called the Leonids, which places that particular scene in November. I headcanon that the Jugdrali consider the solstices to be the actual mid-point of winter and summer, not the beginning.


	3. Event Horizon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I delayed this in case FE Echoes: Shadows of Valentia screwed up my world-building enough to heavily revise it. Right now my feeling on this is "eh, not sufficiently" so here we go.

**Event Horizon**

_Come home to us… please…_

Lewyn wakes with a start, heart pounding and hairs standing up on the nape of his neck, and it’s not the scream of any lost goats or night birds that’s got him so perturbed. 

“What’s wrong?” 

“Bad dream,” he says, and it isn’t a lie. 

The dreams of Erinys don't come as often now, but this time her eyes weren’t pleading with him. The big sad eyes didn’t belong to Fee, either— Naga herself came to him, in a dream so real Lewyn isn’t entirely sure his spirit didn’t make a visit across the ocean. So real, in fact, that the feelings it summoned do not dissolve with the daylight.

Is she summoning him, projecting her own spirit into his dreams to call him back across the sea? That can’t be good; for one, Forseti has broken the laws of his people so many times over in helping the Jugdrali that he knows he’s in for punishment. But something else, some sorrowful chord reverberating in the distance between him and Naga, tells him there’s more, there’s worse…

_It’s like the wind’s changed._

-x-

It’s incredible to him, even now, what the mortal flesh of Lewyn of Silesse can do and what it can’t. His eyesight is no better than that of a regular sharpshooter. His nose and his tongue are likewise ordinary in their skill, which means to the spirit of Forseti they are hopelessly limited in their function. He can transform his body for a brief time but can’t overcome peculiar limitations of Lewyn’s human bone and sinew, which leaves him weaker than many ordinary men. Lewyn might sleep in a snowdrift without suffering frostbite, but Finn can heft nearly twice what Lewyn may carry even though they stand eye to eye, nose to nose.

Human food is more of a luxury than a necessity, though a bite here and there to sustain him is far better than going without. He does need water, and while Tirnanog’s cool spring of sweet water has served him well, in the past he’s gotten by on the dew of the grass, the droplets clinging to leaves, a mouthful of snow. Then too, this body can be healed by Forseti’s own magic— at least until now. He wonders, as he wakes yet again on sheets dampened by cold sweat, what he’s going to do when his time runs out.

-x-

He’s hiding from Naga, who never wanted him caught up in human affairs to start with, who certainly didn’t want him reviving corpses and personally managing a war and would be utterly perplexed by the state he’s now in— half god, half man, ambling about in a human’s shell. As he tries to somehow, on some metaphorical level, make himself invisible to Naga he inevitably starts hiding from Finn. Finn’s an easy man to drift from, after all. He doesn’t pursue; he watches and waits, and eventually he reaches out to close his hand upon nothing because he expected nothing to start with.

Lewyn would pity Finn if he had pity to spare, but he doesn’t, and Finn has no expectation there either.

-x-

Like any couple headed for the rocks, they try to capture the spark of old times by returning to familiar haunts. Lewyn knows this agonizing dance and there is no anticipation of any kind of reawakening as he and Finn head to the beach in silence. Lewyn sits among his reeds, now green and supple, and he plays into the wind and Finn busies himself with something other than the boring human trait of keeping in shape by running in circles. He’s dragged the abandoned skiff well past the high-water mark of the beach and Lewyn realizes, with a certain measure of incredulity, that Finn is making repairs to the boat.

Lewyn pauses his tune and glances over his flute as this effort.

“Do you imagine you can sail away from here?” 

“It would be the fastest route to Leonster,” Finn says, as though speed were the only practical concern.

“You really think that? You’ve been sailing on open seas exactly once by my count and you weren’t even very good at it.”

“Can the Master of Winds not steer one small boat to a safe harbor?”

“I’m not that good,” says Lewyn. “I’m touched by your level of faith in me, but no, I can’t guarantee that.”

And yet Finn continues making repairs to the skiff.

“What makes you think there’s anything left of that or any other place on your old maps?” Lewyn’s put away the flute and is sitting on a piece of driftwood kicking his heels, doing everything he can not to show that he’s actually scared by what Finn wants now to do. “Time passes differently here. It’s been three hundred years since anyone saw you.”

“Then it will prove a most remarkable journey.”

Lewyn sees Finn brush off the attempt at deception with a little smile, even as as he realizes just how far Finn’s gotten in making that wretched little boat seaworthy.

“Why now?” Lewyn asks.

Finn doesn’t say that he’s gotten around to missing his homeland and family, or that he’s gotten bored because Lewyn’s turned boring.

“You told me Lewyn the Bard won’t be the one to pass down the tale of the Last Crusade,” is what he says as he pounds another nail in place with his makeshift hammer. “That would leave me to be the teller.”

“There’s Shannan and Oifey,” Lewyn replies.

“They’re occupied.” replies Finn, for the other children who came of age during Lord Sigurd’s war have holdings to rule. “I now have nothing beyond this.”

“There’s Edain,” 

“You didn’t cultivate Edain in any sense, did you?” It’s not exactly an accusation, though it certainly could’ve been.

“There’s Edain’s sister,” Lewyn offers.

“She does not know herself.” And Lewyn hears the flat finality that comes out when Finn digs in his heels and will not be moved. “You said at the beginning of this interlude that you were completing my tour. I saw most of this world twice over, before and after the apocalypse, and what I missed then I’ve now seen through your eyes. You gave this to me, and I may as well have it.”

-x-

“You can’t leave without me telling you more.” Lewyn offers up this, his last bargaining chip, once they’re back in the security of the convent. “I mean, if you’re going to hand down the story of the Last Crusade, it’d better be the right one.”

“Very well, then.” 

Finn is humoring him now, mostly, but Lewyn forges ahead.

“Okay, so let’s start off with the nature of the gods. Not Yudu and the old gods, but the Dark Lord and the Twelve.”

Out of all the humans of Jugdral, Lewyn’s only told Seliph, and Lewyn suspects the young emperor may carry the secret with him to the grave rather than relate to his people the tale of blood rituals and super-human beings from across the seas.

"Dragons. It's not some kind of metaphor. We're dragons,” he says, after spilling to Finn far too much far too quickly. "Big, scaly. Teeth and claws, wings and a tail. Some breathe fire, some breathe ice, some breathe clouds of magic. Some burrow in the ground, sleeping in the warmth of the earth deeper down than any man can dig with his sad little tools, and some of us fly."

"Is there some relation, then, to the dragons of the Thracian mountains?"

"You don't want to know,” Lewyn says, and in truth he doesn’t want to think of it. A lost tribe, isolated and gone mad and degenerate, is the most likely explanation, which adds a dimension of xenocide to every slaughter the good knights of Leonster dealt the dragon-riders of Thracia. But if Forseti has a deeper kinship with the war beasts that Finn’s left dead in a trail from northmost Agustria to southern Thracia than to Finn himself, this is not the place to ponder it.

“Now, to some extent you’ll need to learn new words to even begin to understand what I’m talking about from here on out. For one thing, the civilization of my actual people doesn’t use magic the way humans do. We taught you all magic, but we don’t need it for our lives.”

“So what do you have that’s so grand that magic is extraneous?” From anyone else that would’ve been mockery.

"Forget it,” Lewyn says after he searches for the right explanations for long fruitless minutes. “Like I said, you don't even have the words to understand what I'm talking about."

“I’m not your docile pet human.”

And they regard one another for a particularly tense moment, the dragon soul in a stolen body facing down the relentlessly stubborn mortal who harnessed himself to fate’s turning wheel through force of will when sensible men kept their head down and let the tides of fate pass over them.

“The word for it,” Lewyn says with a sigh, “is technology.”

“Technology,” Finn says, committing it to memory.

“Yeah. You wouldn't believe the things we can do just with light.”

-x-

Finn can’t sail off in the winter. Lewyn knows he is stalling for time in the way he divulges his secrets to Finn one lesson at a time, because when he runs out of things to say, Finn is going to leave, and then Lewyn will have to go home.

“Forseti doesn’t look like me, exactly,” says Lewyn one evening when he’s feeling reckless because when the seas are flecked with ice and Finn can’t leave for many months. “You’d know he wasn’t human. His ears are pointed.”

“Could you not show me?”

“Show you how Forseti looks as a manakete?” This, to Lewyn, is more intimate than having his human body stripped down to naked skin, and a prickle of revulsion passes up his spine.

“Show yourself to me as you truly are.”

And Lewyn draws in a breath so sharp it hurts, because only Erinys has gone there, and then without knowing what she even was asking.

_You’re not my husband. What are you, really?_

There’s a reason that the real Forseti, the one that existed millennia before Prince Lewyn of Silesse ever touched the holy tome of the winds, left his dragonstone in the keeping of a reckless human prince-turned-errant bard. This is going to cost him.

And yet he does it. He uses that dragonstone to show this persistent mortal his true nature— the four-clawed hands and massive feet, the ruff that looks like fur but is composed of exquisitely fine feathers cascading down his neck, the sinuous tail. Forseti’s body, a shimmering tint somewhere between white and palest gold touched by the green of unfurling leaves, sets the largest room of Tirnanog’s convent aglow like a captive sun.

_Do you understand me now, you fragile little human child with your four decades of memory under the sun? Do you understand what I— what we— can do to any of you in a heartbeat?_

He’s not even at full size, much less his actual strength. But all his senses are restored again, and Forseti can see the redness of warmth itself and the dazzling violet that escapes the human eye. His nostrils are filled with the life and decay of Tirnanog on every level of its structure and he turns his head sniffing for the metallic taint of human fear. He wants Finn to be afraid of him, afraid of the beast his transgressive question has unleashed… and yet, there’s nothing to be found. He can hear the air pulse with every beat of Finn’s heart but Finn is no more afraid of the dragon he’s unwisely invited to bed than he is of the spiders in the convent’s dark recesses.

Forseti roars, and the music of the past and the future rings against the walls of Tirnanog. The sound forces Finn to his knees, his hands over both ears, and yet even then he isn’t afraid of the dragon that could effortlessly take off his head with the claws it’s now grinding into the convent floor.

_For the love of everything holy, do you not care what I am?_

He cannot maintain the form, which gives way even as Forseti swivels his head to give another roar, one that might actually bring the convent down around their ears. His body constricts in every direction so that his feet are not even on the ground when he finishes transforming back to Lewyn and he tumbles forward, wingless, helpless…

This time, Finn’s the one who catches him.

-x-

He’s been drifting for days on a sea of nightmare sounds, a maelstrom of discordance. He sees a great sword through the skull of a dragon and hears rumblings of madness. He sees the ground heave as the children of the Earth Tribe burst forth, mindless in their rage, and their moans reverberate through his body. He sees dragons corrupted, perverted, unspeakable in their decay, and he feels the death of their souls within his own.

He awakens in Lewyn’s body, bound to the tangle of sheets in sweat like a corpse sealed in a shroud with pitch.

"I told you storms were coming."

He says this as Finn comes to his side, offering soup made from sour greens boiled down into a pulp, as though a nourishing meal could possibly help what’s ailing Lewyn now.

“Why did you indulge my request? I think you knew it would harm you,” Finn asks when the soup is gone and Lewyn can, at least, sit up for a bit.

“We are all dying,” he says, knowing it’s the best answer he can manage right now, because the mystery of why anyone ever does anything isn’t something he can untangle. “Our elders go mad. No children have been born in centuries. I am one of the last.”

“Why did you come to us?”

“Because I’m a romantic fool. I… I love you idiots.” The sweat’s dripped down into his eyes. “You stubborn, bullheaded creatures trying to do what’s right in your eye-blink existences.”

He wants to say more, about humans and their misplaced faith and misplaced love, but he’s just too drained to even try. Not as drained of life as he could be, though.

His dragonstone has one more use before it shatters, and Naga needs that of him.

-x-

If Lewyn were fully human, he’d be dying. He burns with regular fevers as winter’s grip lessens on Tirnanog.

"They said Prince Julius suffered often from fevers by the time he came to Manster,” Finn says as he sits with Lewyn through another miserable night. “I’ve wondered if it was some irony that this incarnation of the Dark Lord was locked to a sickly child, or whether Loptyr always consumed his host. He did pass through seventeen emperors, after all..."

"Maybe both. Probably both. I don’t know for certain about Julius, but…” Lewyn swallows and in that moment of pain he hates his inflamed throat and light-weakened eyes. "This dead man has been too long above ground."

Throwing the dragonstone into the sea won’t help him now. He is bound to the turnwheel— up, down, around. Alive, dead, reborn. 

“The apocalypse…” Lewyn says now around his thick tongue. “You know what it is. You’ve seen it. But do you know what that word really means?”

“I suspect not.”

“The uncovering of divine knowledge that makes sense, at last, of earthly reality.” He lifts his hand to make some impudent gesture but instead he closes his burning fingers around Finn’s cool ones. “And that can be my final lesson to you all.”

-x-

And so, in the end, it is Finn who carries Lewyn down to the shore where the seas clear and the repaired skiff is ready to sail.

“Whoever would’ve thought you had such a strong back?” Lewyn mutters. He’s seeing again in his mind the little squire in white boots, with wrists so thin a large man could catch them both up in one hand.

“Some did try their best to break it,” says Finn, and at last he sounds satisfied at having been made not to be broken.

Finn places Lewyn in the skiff as gently as one handles a sleeping child and he wraps the best of the blankets they shared around Lewyn. The blanket is one of those touching and useless human gestures; Lewyn will shut himself down into dormancy once he loses sight of the shore. He doesn’t know what Naga and the rest will do with this human husk that is and is not their brother and it’s another thing he doesn’t want to know. 

“The winds will take me where I need to go,” Lewyn says, and he curses the faintness of the voice coming from his human lips. “And this will take you where you need to be.”

He offers his hand to Finn, who slides the ring off Lewyn’s fourth finger. It was the ring he wore when married to Erinys, but now it’s been imbued with the last spell of human magic Lewyn may ever use. It will transport Finn back to the borders of Leonster so he can take up the unraveled threads of his life there and weave them back into something that will last as long as humans wander the continents of this small planet.

“We are finished, then,” says Finn, who handles the ring like some holy relic from Darna’s great temple.

“Are we yet? Aren’t you going to kiss me goodbye?”

He knows the reaction he’s going to get, the perceptible stiffening of Finn’s pose, the barely audible intake of stifled annoyance, followed by a look so piercing Lewyn can construct an entire sentence out of it.

_I didn’t even give that much to Lachesis._

_Yeah, and I never said a proper goodbye to Erinys the last time, either. Indulge me._

The kiss falls not on his lips, but on the forehead, as a knight might bid farewell to his slain lord on the battlefield, as a priest would kiss an icon of his goddess. Lewyn knows they have, at last, fallen back into the roles crafted for them long before 

“Hey. Thanks for being my friend.” There’s salt in his eyes. “I haven’t been very good at that, in my life…”

“Neither have I.”

"Better luck with that next time around, then?”

“Next time,” Finn echoes, and the blue light of his eyes flares with something even he can’t entirely quench.

“Yeah. Next time, we’ll be better friends…”

There will be a next time, just as there’s been a time before where they argued and laughed and drenched an continent in blood. He can hear a premonition of tomorrow’s Finn and tomorrow’s Lewyn on the winds, and they’re happy for some shining moment, and somewhere out there is tomorrow’s Erinys waiting to be found, and yet none of it brings today’s Lewyn comfort.

_We’ll have to do this all over again…_

Tirnanog, abandoned to time, will fall apart stone by stone and be consumed by the moss and the forest of new trees. Jugdral itself will fade to irrelevance as the great drama of this world shifts to other continents, and those of them bound forever to the turnwheel will wake to the dawn of some new apocalypse, and as Finn propels the skiff into the water’s embrace Lewyn knows somewhere in his aching bones he’s done his part to perpetuate this eternal gyre.

Finn, his azure hair shining like a fleck of moonstone in the sun, walks along the edge of the beach as Lewyn watches the shoreline recede. He reaches the fringe of pale reeds, and Lewyn fancies he sees the very flash of his old ring in the second before Finn disappears.

"He didn't even look back. I like that," Lewyn says to himself.

But the instant that he’s gone from Lewyn’s sight Finn becomes less real than some youth from the next millennium whose deeds are already swirling on the wind’s ceaseless currents. Erinys becomes Naga becomes other green-haired maidens yet unborn, Sigurd himself is reborn and dies in rivers of time that branch into innumerable streams. Hale and farewell in the space of one drawn breath, repeated endlessly across the epochs. Forseti closes his human eyes one last time and awaits Naga’s judgment.

**The End (or is it really?)**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. That was a thing. As I said in the opening notes I was quite concerned that the Gaiden remake, existing as it does on the same world, would "joss" things to shreds and require a rewrite. As its stand, eh. I tweaked a few sentences here and there.
> 
> The main thing is that, while the "reincarnation" angle was meant 100% literally the characters I had in mind when I started the story were not the ones I had in mind at the end of it. The reader is free to bring their own ideas to the table there. :)
> 
> Thank you, Lewyn/Finn anons of the world, for sparking this.

**Author's Note:**

> My concept of Isaach is draws heavily from the Caucasus region (a mixture of steppes and mountains) though it's obviously located very far to the north and I'm taking that into account for the climate. My concept of Lewyn is my own damn fault.


End file.
